Patricia Rozema and Jennifer Montgomery:
All-Yin Filmmaking
Video review by Clark Humphrey for The Stranger, 1/10/97
I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing;
When Night Is Falling
(1987-1995, dir. Patricia Rozema)
When Night Is Falling is best known for tender girl-meets-girl love scenes, turning on viewers of all genders. But it shares a subtler, more important notion with Rozema’s earlier I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing–the notion of lesbians who are regular humans, shy and modest enough to crave an all-yin personal world. Rozema builds these heroines from the “friendly” stuffiness of middle-class Canada, then lovingly shelters them inside safe islands of art-world professions often associated with more arrogant personalities (a commercial gallery in Mermaids, a performance-art troupe in Night). At a time when women who wish to be “successful” are often expected to both denounce and emulate traditionally “male” behaviors, Rozema’s fantasy dramas yearn for a place (even a tiny one) where softness isn’t seen as weakness, where beauty and wisdom are valued.
Art for Teachers of Children
(1995, dir. Jennifer Montgomery)
This movie’s video release adds a prologue with some Lincoln Center film curator praising it as a real indie film, not a low-budget version of a regular Hollywood formula. Instead of wringing its topic (a teenage girl at an elite boarding school poses nude for, and offers up her virginity to, her photography teacher) for either salaciousness or for trauma, Montgomery employs stilted dialogue and deadpan acting to portray the affair as stunting the heroine’s emotional growth, leaving her prematurely jaded. Montgomery’s 16mm, b/w cinematography perfectly matches this cold mood to the photographer’s icy, sexless figure studies. It’s the first feature-lengther by Montgomery, a leader in the “women’s personal film” movement Lois Maffeo wrote about in a prior Stranger feature. She and her colleagues in this genre are creating a new media form out of something women have always done–telling their own stories.
